‘Everytown for Gun Safety’ pushes to curb gun sales on Internet

The gun-control group, “Everytown for Gun Safety,” is pushing for limits on firearm sales on the Internet, saying criminals and domestic abuse suspects can sometimes skirt background checks to purchase weapons online.

The group released a report this week called “Hiding in Plain Sight” that found buyers in Vermont especially are given carte blanche with online gun purchases — even though these same buyers would be barred from deals with licensed outlets, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The group seeks a closing of Vermont’s gun sales law loopholes, but it is also using the findings to press for other states to take up gun control failures at the federal level, and pass them into law.

“We’ve seen some real progress on the state level,” like in Washington in 2014 when we passed a referendum that shuttered loopholes, said Jack Warner, a spokesman for the gun-control group, in the Los Angeles Times.

In the report, Everytown kept track of gun sales on three major websites and even set up a sting operation to sell 24 different guns between July 28 and Oct. 9, to see if any buyers with prohibitive backgrounds would try to deal, the Los Angeles Times reported. And they did, the group found.

Of the 169 hopeful buyers who responded to the sales ad, seven were barred by law from possessing firearms, the Los Angeles Times reported. The group then extrapolated data to conclude that too many online gun sales were being made with those who shouldn’t own firearms.

“Gun sales transacted on just three websites put an estimated 126 guns into the hands of felons and domestic abusers in Vermont — and likely many more — in this year alone,” the report said, the Los Angeles Times reported.